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Mabel
|next = |viewers = (live / total) 1.81m / 4.06m |synopsis = Jimmy and Chuck's relationship deteriorates. Kim feels the pressure of running her own firm. Mike investigates the note left on his car. }} "Mabel" is the first episode of the third season of Better Call Saul and the twenty-first episode of the series altogether. Summary Teaser In present-day Omaha, "Gene" carries on with his job at the local Cinnabon. During a lunch break, he sees a shoplifter hide inside a photo booth. Gene reluctantly tips off pursuing police officers to the shoplifter's location, resulting in an arrest. However, as the shoplifter is led away, Gene is overcome with emotion and shouts at him to say nothing and hire a lawyer. When he returns to work, Gene faints. BCS 3x01 01.png BCS 3x01 02.png BCS 3x01 03.png Act I Following Jimmy's confession to forging the Mesa Verde documents, Chuck hides the tape recorder in a desk drawer while Jimmy phones Howard. When he returns, Jimmy helps Chuck remove the foil covering the walls in his living room. Jimmy finds an old copy of The Adventures of Mabel -- a book Chuck read to him when they were young -- and the two brothers briefly reminisce about their childhood. However, Chuck cuts the nostalgia short and tells Jimmy that he will neither forgive nor forget what he has done. "You will pay," Chuck states firmly. Jimmy returns to Wexler McGill to give Kim an update on Chuck, and remarks that he had briefly forgotten what it felt like to have his brother not hate him. Meanwhile, Chuck invites Howard to his house and plays him the tape of Jimmy's confession. While Howard is livid, he reminds Chuck that the tape cannot be legally used as evidence against Jimmy, nor can it be used to win Mesa Verde back to HHM. Chuck implies that he has something else in mind. Act II BCS 3x01 05.png BCS 3x01 06.png BCS 3x01 07.png After finding the mysterious message on his windshield in the desert, Mike understands that his hit on Hector has been completely compromised and Mike himself is most likely in danger. He drives at break-neck speeds to flee the reserve in his station wagon. His first intuition is that someone has placed a tracking device on his vehicle. Not easily able to spot it, he stops in a junkyard and begins to meticulously disassemble the vehicle. After hours of unsuccessful searching, and with the junkyard about to close, Mike has an epiphany: he takes apart the wagon's gas cap and finds a tracking device inside. At home, he finds and examines another device hidden in his Chrysler sedan, recording its ID number. Act III At WM, Captain Bauer shows up and angrily confronts Jimmy about fraudulently gaining access to his airbase to shoot his TV commercial. After momentarily cracking, Jimmy defiantly refuses Bauer's demand to take it off the air and raises the possibility that Bauer himself may be demoted for letting Jimmy onto the base in the first place. Bauer warns Jimmy that smart little guys like him, who do not play straight, always end up paying. Before leaving WM, he yells at Jimmy's other clients: "A lawyer you can trust, my ass!" Mike works his regular night shift at the parking booth until he is convinced that he is not being watched. Quietly shutting down the booth, he covertly removes the bugged fuel cap from his car and hides it in one of the overpass pylons. Confident that his tail has been shaken, Mike drives off into the night. Act III At a railway warehouse, Mike meets up with Caldera, who is upset about being called in the middle of the night. Mike requests a tracking device and monitor identical to the one used to bug his vehicle. Caldera agrees, but warns Mike he will need time and extra money for this job. He also admonishes Mike to keep to "business hours" when contacting him. At Mesa Verde, Kim presents the updated paperwork to Paige, who praises her instantly on the quality of the documents. After hearing Paige's disgust at Chuck's "incompetence" and arrogance, however, a conflicted Kim asks to hang onto the corrected documents for one more night. Visibly struggling with her professional ethics, Kim obsesses over a single punctuation mark on her final report to Mesa Verde, reluctant to submit it and profit from Jimmy's fraud. Act IV During a visit to Chuck's house, Ernesto brings new batteries for Chuck's tape recorder. Feigning not to be able to change the batteries due to his EHS condition, he asks Ernesto to do so. When he finishes changing the batteries, the recorder plays back a small section of Jimmy's confession -- it seems that the play button had accidentally been left on. The passage is sufficiently explicit for Ernesto to grasp the gravity of what he has just heard. Chuck pressures Ernesto to never tell anyone else on the pretext of confidentiality. Stunned, Ernesto hurriedly finishes his tasks and leaves. Chuck seems pleased to have managed what appears to be the first step in his gambit against Jimmy. BCS 3x01 10.png BCS 3x01 11.png BCS 3x01 12.png At his house, Mike begins his own move against the owner of the tracking devices. Having obtained his replacement tracking device from Caldera, Mike switches the original device from the Chrysler with his own, and then proceeds to drain the original's battery by wiring it to a transistor radio, while he waits next to a window. Eventually, someone arrives to replace the "drained" tracker with a fresh one, unwittingly giving Mike the means to follow them. After arming himself and removing the gas cap containing the newly-planted tracker from his car, Mike drives into the night and begins his pursuit. Official Photos better-call-saul-episode-301-jimmy-odenkirk-2-935.jpg Better-call-saul-episode-301-jimmy-odenkirk-935.jpg Better-call-saul-episode-301-chuck-mckean-2-935.jpg Better-call-saul-episode-301-chuck-mckean-935.jpg Better-call-saul-episode-301-jimmy-odenkirk-5-935.jpg Better-call-saul-episode-301-mike-banks-3-935.jpg Better-call-saul-episode-301-jimmy-odenkirk-3-935.jpg Better-call-saul-episode-301-mike-banks-935.jpg Better-call-saul-episode-301-jimmy-odenkirk-4-935.jpg Better-call-saul-episode-301-mike-banks-2-935.jpg Trivia *Chuck mentions a Daffy Duck rip-off nightlight that would get so hot they thought it would burn the house down. This is reminiscent of what happened in the season finale. *Jimmy's elderly female client, when listing flowers, includes Lily of the Valley, the plant Walt used to poison Brock in Breaking Bad. *A shot of Mike hiding the tracker on his car before going for a drive directly mirrors a similar shot of Gus doing the same in Season 4 of Breaking Bad. *Another scene directly mirroring Breaking Bad is when "Gene" faints in the teaser similar to Walter White fainting in Pilot. *The episode is dedicated to Eric Jutsen. He worked as a re-recording mixer on all seasons of Breaking Bad and passed away on August 11, 2016, just two weeks shy of his 44th birthday. Along with frequent collaborator Jeffrey Perkins and Darryl L. Frank, he shared three consecutive Emmy nominations for Outstanding Sound Mixing for the show’s final three seasons. They and others also earned Cinema Audio Society Award noms for those same seasons of the show, and Justen was part of the team that won the 2014 Motion Picture Sound Editors Award for Best Sound Editing – Short Form Sound Effects and Foley in Television. *In Better Call Saul Insider Podcast, Vince Gilligan confessed that he "did not have a lot of fun directing" the first two episodes of season 3, because "it was very, very hard (...) directing two episodes back to back". The last time he did that was in season 4 of Breaking Bad ( , ) and he was "10% younger" and "that 10% make a great difference". However, he is very proud of these two episodes. * The Adventures of Mabel is a book that Vince's mother, Gail Gilligan, was reading to his brother Patrick and him when they were little kids. Gail is retired now but worked as a reading teacher and loves that book. * The massive statues in the Mesa Verde lobby were built for the series. * The building used for Mesa Verde has already been used in a scene of Breaking Bad, when Skyler plays the 'dumb blonde' so that Beneke Fabricators escapes IRS. Production Credits Starring= Starring * Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill * Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut * Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler * Patrick Fabian as Howard Hamlin * Michael Mando as Nacho Varga (credit only) * Michael McKean as Chuck McGill |-| Guest Starring= Guest Starring * Cara Pifko as Paige Novick * Brendan Fehr as Bauer * Joe DeRosa as Caldera * Brandon K. Hampton as Ernesto |-| Co-Starring= Co-Starring * Raquel Pino as Raquel * Samantha Benavides as Sam * Dylan Riley Snyder as Young Skeev * Jon Summers as Police Officer * Nathaniel Augustson as Mall Security Guard * Forrie Smith as Junkyard Owner * Teddy Eggleston as Mrs. Siemasko * Mary Woods as Jenn Siemasko * Alaina Warren Zachary as Mrs. VanKamp * Audra Charity as Greta |-| Uncredited= Uncredited * Richard Beal as Shopper Featured Music *'"Sugar Town" '''by Nancy Sinatra (Played during the "Gene" montage at the beginning of the episode.) *'"Can't Leave the Night"' by BadBadNotGood *'"Memory"' by Morrie Morrison Orchestra *'"Hurry Sundown"' by Little Richard *'"Alfonso Muskedunder"''' by Todd Terje Memorable Quotes es:Mabel Category:Better Call Saul episodes Category:Season 3 episodes (Better Call Saul)